Tag: sunset

I’ve got a long video covering Ultima Online releasing on Massively OP today. I’m essentially touring all my favorite places and activities in the game while discussing the game’s development history as a lesson in sandbox design. It’s one of my favorite soapboxes. And making the video was so much fun that I thought I’d go back through my video files…

I’ve already spilled plenty of ink about the Massively sunset saga, so here’s the short version: AOL decided to dump a ton of quality, profitable pro blogs last week, tried to keep it a secret until almost the last minute, and then cut us all loose without the slightest sorrow, merging our years of work into a mess  that I can…

When Tiny Speck announced that it was closing its weird and beautiful browser MMO, Glitch, studio founder Stuart Butterfield famously blamed it at least in part on the game’s lack of guidance — there just wasn’t enough hand-holding. “A lot of people were just like, ‘I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do,’” he lamented. “Some people took…

In the struggle to save City of Heroes from extinction, activists (masktivists?) are faced with two challenges: convince NCsoft to keep or sell rather than sunset the game and convince the greater gaming community that it’s worth fighting for. There is already a team working on the first, so I’d like to tackle the second. The first step is to…

Am I cursed? It seems as if every game I’ve really fallen in love with in the last few years is being killed off, one by one, even the teeny-tiny ones like Zentia. Go ahead and laugh, but I still feel the loss of Star Wars Galaxies deeply, and my main consolation when it happened last year is that at…

I spent last weekend trying to decide the best way to end it all — in Star Wars Galaxies, that is, which we learned will be shutting down in less than six months. Star Wars Galaxies was and is a brilliant sandbox game, which I loudly proclaimed in “The Uncle Owen Paradox” Soapbox rant column just two days before I…